The construction workers who work there do not call it Ground Zero. To them it is simply "the pile". Their war is not with the Taliban or even Bin Laden - they never get a look-in. Their war is with the pile.

It is a war they are winning. In eight weeks they have shifted an estimated 350,000 tonnes, nobody knows for sure how much.

The south tower is down to a one storey perimeter of stumps with deep holes below. Only the north wall of the north tower still stands, much of it leaning crazily against the neighbouring block that it destroyed in its fall.

The battle line at ground zero is military in its precision. Four companies have divided the work among them, quartering the site.

The key weapon in their armoury is "the grappler" - a tracked digger with vast clawed mouth on the end of its hydraulic arm. Deep inside Ground Zero you realise that all concrete, all masonry vaporised to nothing leaving mangled ironwork in its wake. Walking through it is like tracking through bramble.

The smell and the noise are overwhelming, the ground shudders with the sheer weight of machinery. There are at least 50 different grapplers working at any one moment on the six-and-a-half hectare (16-acre) site.

Trucks shift back and forth, oxyacetylene cutters cast sparks into the air by day and night. And then quite suddenly you stumble across a little knot of firemen, armed only with picks, small forks, and their bare hands. They scrabble tirelessly in the dirt looking for even the smallest remnant of their missing comrades.

Two days ago they found long brown hair of a woman with some bones, and a fire department issue boot with part of a foot.

Although no one here ever talks about Afghanistan - the fall of Kabul while I was there found no mention on the site - these fireman do conjure visions of Afghans scrabbling at less sophisticated but equally charged wreckage with their bare hands.

Only one man has any visual archive of what is happening here. Joel Meyerowitz is famous in America for his landscape photography of Cape Cod or cityscapes of St Louis. But for 20 years he had a studio set some 20 blocks back from the twin towers.

He photographed them in all weathers, all seasons - just because they were always there, only their colours changed with the conditions.

Now that they are gone, he has pledged to the New York Museum to record the recovery of the place where they once stood. His is an extraordinary daily photographic account seen through a 1944 wooden view camera with a huge negative plate.

The prime minister, Tony Blair, has complained that the media has too easily moved on from the events of September 11. In truth it is New York's police who have moved the media on.

"This is a scene of crime," one officer told me. "No pictures."

Yet this is also a scene that depicts America's can-do spirit in extremis. Some phoenix will rise from all this. The men who toil here are fed, watered, rested, massaged and loved by the people of New York.

Both Tony Blair and George Bush have promised not to forget the Afghans. But leaving Ground Zero you do find yourself wondering, will the world put even a tenth of the effort and money into rescuing Afghanistan as is being deployed in salvaging this small part of lower Manhattan?